Ideas, philosophy, politics, current events and happenings, music, literature, art and simple incidents out of my everyday life; Reflections and observations which, I hope, might just get you thinking ...

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Thursday, 22 March 2012

Around the World in 1762

Madame de Pompadour - Francois Boucher

It’s been
quite a while since I warmed up the old time machine in the garden shed for a
quick trip around the world. High time, therefore, to power up the motors,
check the dials, make sure that all the screws and bolts are secure and take a
look at the way things were. After all, any machine will rust up if it’s not
used every now and again. We’ve already looked at 1810 and 1911. I thought this time we’d go a
little further back, turning the main dial back a quarter of a millennium, to
1762.

The machine
is programmed to follow the rising sun, so we begin over the Pacific. Though
some European explorers have made contact with the various groups of Pacific
islands, their influence has been small; indigenous Polynesian peoples still
live their various diverse forms of life, largely undisturbed. The same can be
said for Australia and New Zealand.
This isolation will not, however, last much longer. Interest in the Pacific
area is growing in Europe, and in six years time the Royal Society will send
an expedition, under the command of James Cook – who in 1762 is charting the
coasts of eastern Canada and
Newfoundland – to observe the transit of Venus
on Tahiti and explore large amounts of the New Zealand and Australian
coastlines.

Japan is still a largely closed country,
the Tokugawa Shogunate strictly controlling very limited trade with the gaijin western foreigners following the sakoku (“locked country”) policy. In China, the Manchus are at the height of their
power, the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, who reigned for almost sixty
years, almost until the end of the century, exercising control over an area
more or less contiguous with the modern PeoplesRepublic.
There is increasing trade with Europeans, particularly in tea, which is
becoming ever more popular in Europe, especially in Britain and its colonies. The
British and Dutch East India Companies are competitors in the tea business. The
Portuguese maintain their trade colony in Macao, but it is in decline. Hong Kong is an unimportant island, inhabited by a few
thousand fishermen and charcoal burners.

Farther
south, however, Europeans are more present, the Spaniards controlling the Philippines and the Dutch firmly ensconced in
what is now Indonesia.
There is no love lost between the Protestant Dutch, on the one hand, and the
Catholic Spaniards and Portuguese on the other, they have been rivals for
lucrative trade and influence in Eastern Asia
for a hundred and fifty years now.

Clive with Family - Joshua Reynolds

To the west,
the Seven Year War, which is still raging in Central Europe, has taken on a
global aspect with a world-wide struggle for power and influence between France and Britain
having far-reaching consequences for India. By 1762, the British – in
the form of the East India Company and its brilliant, ruthless military and
administrative genius, Robert Clive – has managed to basically wipe out French
influence in the subcontinent and to majorly expand its power (and profits) in
the increasingly moribund Mughal (Mogul) Empire. It is no exaggeration to claim
that the British Empire in India
was basically founded in the 1750s and 60s.

Africa at this time is haemorrhaging people, both from the east and west
coasts, in the ghastly form of slavery. A majority of the slaves have
originally been captured by other Africans as a result of raids or wars – in
East Africa they are sold to Arab traders who sell them on throughout the
Middle East and the Orient; in West Africa it is the Europeans who have an
insatiable thirst for labourers to use in their American colonies, above all in
the Caribbean, where the vastly lucrative cultivation of sugar demands huge
amounts of human workers for its brutally hard cultivation, harvesting and
processing. By the middle of the 18th Century, the entire economies
of islands like French Saint-Domingue (Haiti),
Martinique and Guadaloupe and British Barbados and Jamaica are almost totally based on
sugar, making vast profits for a small group of unbelievably rich sugar barons.
But slaves from West Africa are also being shipped in their hundreds of
thousands to Portuguese Brazil and the more southerly British colonies in North America, to work on the growing tobacco and cotton
plantations.

Europe is at war, though the Seven Year War is winding down and will end next
year. On the continent, the major struggle is between Prussia, supported by Britain
and some other German allies, on the one side, and France,
Austria and Russia on the
other. After initial serious setbacks, Frederick
the Great of Prussia has basically fought the Austrians and Russians to a
standstill – the borders following the end of the war will show few differences
to those at the beginning. The struggle between France
and Britain rages globally,
with the French suffering major losses in India
and, above all, Canada.
As such, the Seven Year War can reasonably be called the first real World War.
Though the short-term costs for Britain
are high, the war definitively establishes Britain as one of the foremost
world powers. But the administration of global empires frequently involve difficult
policy decisions and some of those made by Britain with relation to her
American colonies (particularly taxation policies and the prohibition of
settlement west of the Appalachians) will have fateful consequences.

Europe and
its colonial offspring in the Americas have already begun to cast a longer
shadow, one which will grow to dominate the entire globe, for better or worse,
in the next two hundred and fifty years, and as such demand our particular
attention. It is the century of absolutism, where kings and emperors believe in
their divine right to rule and rule accordingly (with the exception of the eccentric
Britons, who had severely restricted the power of their monarch to the
advantage of Parliament at the end of the 17th Century). But it is
also the Century of the Enlightenment, where great minds in Europe and America are
thinking about humanity and society in new and radical ways and reaching
radical conclusions. In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishes two of his most
influential works, Emile and The Social Contract. David Hume, in his
dry, somewhat cynical art, has managed to call almost everything into question.
Voltaire is one of the most admired figures in Europe and has even spent a
number of years in Berlin,
at the invitation of the Prussian monarch, Frederick the Great – though they
soon fell out. For, though the monarchs believed in their absolute right to
rule, many of them were open for the ideas of the new thinkers of the Enlightenment
– ideas like tolerance and rationality. The Empress Elizabeth of Russia, who
dies at the beginning of the year, takes pride in the fact that not a single
Russian has been executed during her twenty year reign.

Though it
is a time where women are regarded, almost universally, as inferior to men, in
1762 women are in charge of some of the most powerful empires in the world. Elizabeth will be
succeeded this year, after a few months of rule by her son, Peter III, by her
daughter-in-law, the German born Catherine the Great. The Austrian Empire is
ruled by the firm hand of Maria Theresa. And even in France, where the king is Louis XV,
it is no secret that the real power behind the throne is his mistress, Madame
de Pompadour.

The young Mozart

In art, it
is a period where, it seemed, everyone who was anyone wanted to have their
portrait painted – if you had enough money, you could visit London and have your image preserved for
eternity by Joshua Reynolds or Thomas Gainsborough. In music, a golden age is dawning.
Joseph Hayden, who has just become Kapellmeister
to the immensely wealthy Esterházy family, will write his 9th Symphony.
In Salzburg Leopold Mozart, having discovered that his daughter, Nannerl, and
especially his six-year-old son, Wolfgang, are musically gifted, has resolved
to use their talents to secure his family fortunes and will embark with them
this year on a musical tour of Europe. The Jackson Five of classical music.

While South
and Central America remain under Spanish or (in the case of Brazil) Portuguese control, Britain, with the enthusiastic help of its
colonists, has succeeded in throwing France
out of most of North America. Wolfe’s defeat
of Montcalm at the siege of Quebec in 1759
paved the way for British sovereignty over Canada. But the high costs of the
war would lead Britain
to increase taxation in its American colonies. In so far as the British felt
obliged to justify this at all, they argued that the colonists were the ones
who had benefited most from the victory, saved as they were from the undoubted
horrors of French rule. But the one great advantage the colonists had hoped
for, the right to expand westwards beyond the Appalachians,
was denied to them by their British overlords, who had given the native tribes (many
of whom had allied themselves with the French in the war) assurances that there
would be no white settlement in Trans-Appalachia. The seeds of the American
Revolution were sown, seeds which would be watered by the ideas of the
Enlightenment. And practical experience in the French and Indian War (as the
Seven Year War was known in America)
was also significant for the future – one of the major American military
talents to cut his teeth in the conflict was the young Virginian, George
Washington.

But for all
the sprouting ideas of the Enlightenment, all the signs of the changes still to
come, life, for most of the world population in 1762 (around 850 million), goes
on as it had always done. Most people still wrestle an uncertain, insecure life
from the land, are illiterate (or poorly educated at best), living often short lives
of brutally hard work, sickness, hunger, exploitation at the hands of the rich and
powerful, and often violent death. In Britain, the transformation which will
become known as the Industrial Revolution has already begun; in two years time James
Hargreaves will build his first Spinning Jenny and the new “Factory System,” where
relatively lowly skilled workers are gathered in larger numbers to use
increasingly complex technology to produce large quantities of manufactured
products, is starting to make a mark in various areas of production. One of the
most successful early entrepreneurs to make his name and fortune in this manner,
is the pottery manufacturer, Josiah Wedgewood (the grandfather of Charles Darwin),
who set up the first true pottery factory near Manchester in the 1750s. But the widespread
growth of new, immensely more productive methods of production– as well as
political and many other changes – which will transform the world, are still a
few decades in the future.